Today, independent developer Keepsake Games is launching its debut game, Jump Space, on Steam Early Access and Xbox Game Preview. At Gamescom 2025, I met with Keepsake Games co-founder and game director Filip Coulianos (who previously worked at Hazelight Studios with Josef Fares) to discuss this first-person cooperative space adventure game where up to four players take the roles of a spaceship's crew. The backstory is that evil robots have attacked humans everywhere in the galaxy and, as such, robots are the game's antagonists.
In Jump Space, the spaceship is your collective Diablo character. You'll keep upgrading it together as you complete missions throughout the game. A session starts in the hangar, where you meet up, customize your character, pick what ship to play and which components you want for the ship, and then choose the mission. The game is powered by the Unity engine and isn't that much of a looker, but it runs very smoothly, even at this stage.
It's best to immediately clarify that Jump Space is not some kind of sci-fi simulation game. Instead, it is meant to be very accessible, with highly intuitive controls. That said, every component of the spaceship is physically represented. You can walk up to the engine and uninstall it. If the engine breaks down in the middle of a mission, someone must run down there and fix it.
There's also a power grid where a block represents every component in the ship, and the challenge is to fit everything onto the green squares. If you have really powerful weapons, they will be very big blocks, and you might not be able to fit everything onto the grid. This means you have to really think about what things you can bring on a mission.
Keepsake Games also hammered in another key feature: the seamlessness between the inside and outside of the spaceship. Players can just walk on the outside, double-type space, detach themselves from the ship and fly around in zero G. If you hold SHIFT, you will start flying around. You can also board other ships while flying; it's all seamless. Lastly, there's a grappling hook-type gadget that can be used to latch on surfaces. It is very useful when moving in and out of the spaceship.
At this stage, Jump Space is a little barebones in terms of content, but it's also very fun to play. Depending on how well the developer is able to expand and improve the game throughout early access, it could turn out to be a very popular title in the genre. The game is currently $19.99 and
Philip, what are we doing here?
For this mission, we will travel to and defend a friendly ship that has been attacked by evil robots. To get there, we have to do a series of jumps now.
Can you fly without people being seated?
Yes, you can, but then they would die. You'd have to revive them and that costs resources, so it's probably not a good idea. It's worth noting that with every mission, we don't really know what's going to happen because the map is procedurally generated, so we don't know what awaits us. We also share ammunition, so we might run out of that. But you can craft ammunition, components, weapons and stuff like that on the ship using a shared resource called materia.
Can every player repair ship components?
Yes, we don't have classes in the game, so anybody can do anything. You can just drop everything you're doing and get to the most pressing task.
This is a mission in a super-compressed format with two jumps. Obviously, there can be long missions with eight jumps that last like half an hour. It depends on how much time you want to spend in the game.
Do you also have missions on planets?
Yes, absolutely. We didn't see that in here, but there are definitely desert planets, ice planets, asteroids, and moonlike areas. Roughly half of all the levels take place on different types of planets. Some missions are much more on foot, others are more on the ship, and others still are a mix of the two.
Do you have a randomized mission system, too?
Yeah. In the mission we just saw, all the jumps up to the very end were all kind of randomized. Even if we played the same defend the ship mission five times, it would never quite play the same way, and what happens within each level is also a little bit different every time.
Sometimes there could be very few enemies, sometimes it could be a lot. We also have an AI in the background that we call the Director, which keeps track of what we're doing. It could spawn various events that could happen, like asteroid showers or ion storms, if we're doing too well. Even if all the levels you're seeing are handcrafted, there's a lot of randomized aspects to the game.
What about the planets in Jump Space? Are they randomized, too?
The planets are handcrafted. But you can't fly around the entire planet, as every level is kind of a bubble. If you tried to fly in a direction, eventually, after a long while, again, the game would tell you to turn back. So, it's not procedurally generated. Nothing really is. We just have some randomization in the end, in sort of the composition of a mission and what happens within each level.
I saw something like character levels. Is that right?
Yeah. That is kind of under development. The idea is that the more emissions you play and finish, the higher you can get with the level of your character. Certainly, rewards will be given to you, depending on what level you are, so maybe you get like a helmet at level 10 or something like that. We'll see how we developed that in the future, but for now, it's more to show off how long you've been playing.
Would you get more powerful with those rewards?
During the early access of Jump Space, we're going to work on allowing you to customize your character so that maybe you can add augmentations to your suit. Also, right now, you're stuck with one pistol, and maybe you will be able to unlock different pistols, stuff like that. It's not in the game right now, but it's something we are going to work on during early access. Right now, most of the upgrades are focused around the ship. But we can tell that players will really want to upgrade their characters as well. That's going to be something that happens during early access.
What else are you planning to add throughout the early access phase?
One thing the community really wants is more ships. We have two ships now, but we look forward to make much more in the future. Another thing is more missions. At the early access launch, there's only Chapter One, but with every big update, we'll add more missions with the story that finally concludes with us fighting against the evil robots. We'll add more equipment for players.
Another thing that's been pretty popular among the community is endless missions, trying to survive for as many jumps as possible. The game would never end up until your crew gets destroyed, trying to get as far as it can. Generally, we also want to expand the difficulty spectrum of missions, catering to both casual players and more hardcore players.
Of course, right now, we're releasing for PC and Xbox. We would like to release Jump Space on all consoles, but as we are a small team, we're gonna do one console at a time.
Did you already think about a potential Nintendo Switch 2 port?
I mean, right now, we're open to anything. I think it depends on how well we are doing, how well the game is selling, and how well the Switch 2 is doing.
So far, I would say the Switch 2 is doing pretty well. Anyway, do you have cross-play between the PC and Xbox version?
We do not. We are just a small team and we have to really be careful about what we attempt to do. Maybe sometime in the far future. We want to focus on the game first.
Do you have humanoid enemies as well, or just robots?
No. We do robots, mainly because of production reasons. They're easy to make, while making humans is a lot more work. We would love to have like pirates and stuff you can fight off. I think that depends on how well the game is doing, and you know, if we can expand the team. Nothing is off the table, but it's just a matter of where do we want to put our money.
How many developers do you have at Keepsake?
We're sixteen in the office at Stockholm, and then we have some contractors, but the team itself has like 16 people.
I know you've got some prior experience, though.
Yes, I was a founding member of Hazelight. I worked a lot with Josef Fares on A Way Out, It Takes Two, and Brothers: A Tale of Two Sons.
This is a very different game from those titles.
Definitely. This game has really been something I've been working on in my spare time for a long time before starting the studio. I really love sci-fi. But the lessons I learned while at Hazelight were very valuable. Even though the games are different, there's a little bit of magic from Hazelight as well.
What's the price going to be?
$19.99.
Do you plan to increase it after early access?
That's the plan. We'll see how quickly or how far into the development of early access. It depends on the reception we get and how much content we're able to produce.
This is a co-op game, and you don't want the price to be why one of your friends doesn't want to jump in with you, right? We're quite aggressive on the price, but we're hoping to compensate by having a lot of people be able to play. We'll definitely announce way ahead of time if we decide to increase the price.
Do you think you'd be open to adding Jump Space to Game Pass and/or PlayStation Plus if Microsoft or Sony asked? Would you like that?
Depends on the deal. We're open for anything. It depends on what deal is on the table. We're great fans of Game Pass, for example. We've been using, but it all depends on what we get in return.
Do you plan to support mouse and keyboard on Xbox at some point?
Yes. We don't have it today, but it sounds like it should be pretty easy to do.
Thank you for your time.
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